Spiritual Progress? Is It Even Possible? How?
Doing your spiritual homework #3
Sceptical spirituality
Doing your spiritual homework #3
In #1 and #2 we’ve set out some of the simplest necessary basics designed to clear your mind and learn to think about spiritual subjects in an objective and systematic way. For many people, this runs counter to everything they instinctively feel about where spirituality ‘resides’, because they believe that spirituality is all about feelings and emotions and comforting thoughts. So the idea of ‘taking a cold hard look’ at what you are doing and thinking when it comes to spirituality just doesn’t seem right, somehow. No charismatic religious leader or guru in history has ever advocated ‘thinking clearly’ as a fundamental spiritual exercise, because, as is so patently obvious, they would lose all their followers in a matter of months and be out of a job. All gurus hate the idea of their disciples doing any ‘thinking’.
Just to recap: if you want to make progress spiritually, you need to learn to apply careful systematic and objective thinking to all aspects of your ideas about spirituality, and see what you are left with. The fact is, you will not be left with very much at all — but this is not a problem, it’s a form of basic liberation, because now you can explore what’s really going on, instead of wasting your time on imaginings. The realm of the imagination is infinite, and the more you feed it, the more it seems to offer, but unless you have already fallen off the cliff and are no longer able to distinguish between imaginings and reality, something deep down will tell you that ‘imaginings’ are not a solution to anything. How can they be ?
Remember to write things down, in the clearest, simplest, jargon- and doctrine-free language, in your notebook. You don’t have to go back and read what you’ve written — it’s not a diary for posterity, unless you want it to be — but it will help to clarify your thinking. Words — the right words — are the ultimate tools for thinking and clarity of thought; so take infinite care to find just the ones you need.
Let’s suppose you’ve made a good start, what’s supposed to happen along the way?
Unfortunately, to begin with — meaning at the beginning of your quest for impartial, objective, authentic spiritual knowledge — you are likely to experience much more confusion than clarity, and much more uncertainty than reassurance. There is good reason for this: your intellect is not capable of resolving ultimate questions in a matter of a few days because it can only work with what it has, and to begin with, it doesn’t have much. And probably — if you’re like me — it doesn’t have anything at all. It’s trying to work out complex equations with only a clumsy knowledge of basic arithmetic — but it’s worth you having a go, if only to see for yourself the limits of your own capacities. But the exercise just seems to lead to a series of dead ends, with no possible way out.
This is where persistence and patience come in.
Because you’re learning to look — coldly and clearly and dispassionately — at exactly what your situation is, spiritually speaking. You’re asking yourself ‘What am I trying to do ? And why am I trying to do it ?’ and the answer — in simple terms — is that your mind/intellect — doesn’t know the answer, so it either ‘goes quiet’, or it decides to dip into the imagination, calling up all sorts of imaginative possibilities. Either way, you’re left with the feeling that nothing is happening, coupled with the equally unpleasant feeling that perhaps nothing is ever going to happen. Shouldn’t you just go back to the good old feelings of ‘God loves me, and I’m special, so if I surrender myself to my guru, all will be well’?
You can if you want to, but this type of thinking is for kids. Don’t go that route.
If your attempts at ‘thinking things through’ leave you feeling overwhelmed and lost, then take a break, and leave the process alone, and come back to it later — next week, next month, next year. It’ll still be there, waiting for you. In the meantime, have a beer or two or three and watch a good movie.
But we still haven’t explained ‘what’s supposed to happen?’, which we now need to do.
What happens is this: you start by clearing your mind of the infantile, outmoded and demeaning ideas that you’ve been clinging on to, and you learn to start to look at your ‘experiencing’ — all aspects of it, as a totality — in an objective and inquiring manner. You’re asking the most searching existential questions possible, and looking to see if you can find an answer.
You’re giving up your addiction to sentimental and worthless mysticism, and looking to see if there may be ‘something else’ out there.
And eventually, by exercising your powers of objective and clinical observation, you will start to notice things.
You will notice how your thought patterns operate, and how they organise themselves around certain key perspectives, and how they hope for certain outcomes. You can’t do anything about this, because these thought patterns constitute ‘what you are’, yet being able to observe them will give you an insight into them, and possessing this insight will open up further questioning, such as ‘what would happen if X was substituted for Y ?’ Exploring alternative scenarios can be extremely rewarding when it comes to exploring spiritual ideas, because ‘alternatives’ show you how flimsy and empty and wholly self-interested most of your ideas about yourself and your world are, and once you awaken to that insight, you can begin to get a real handle on what’s going on with life, the universe, and everything else.
The types of thoughts outlined here are only examples and illustrations, and do not constitute a fixed roadmap. You will have your own interests, and your own way of conceptualising things, and you will have things which mean a lot to you, and other things which mean nothing to you. None of this is important. What matters is that you try to examine things quietly and calmly, and see how it all fits together, and how ‘you’ — as an experiencing being — are constituted.
Is this really ‘spiritual progress’? In what way?
It’s progress in the sense that, once you get a clear idea of the method we’ve outlined here, there is now nothing between you and the fundamental facts of existence. You are no longer beholden to any doctrines or teachings or other people’s interpretations of what’s in front of you. You are starting to look at things ‘as they are’ in themselves, and not as seen through someone else’s eyes. You may not think that this amounts to much at the beginning, but in truth it does. It’s a massive step towards finding a way to resolve the mystery of the human predicament.
There is much more that needs to be said on all this, but for now let’s just push the envelope to round off this session.
Exercise #2 — try some ‘ultimate questioning’, for yourself
‘Ultimate’ questioning — meaning questions at the very end of the universe, beyond which no further questioning is possible.
Basically, ‘something’ has created you — you are a ‘creature’ — and a creature that ‘experiences’. The question then is, ‘what’s the point of all this?’ — ‘why is there this creature (ie me) experiencing all this?’ — ‘what’s it all for?’ — again, this time in the demotic: ‘What’s the fucking point of all this bloody shit we have to go through?!’
These are the types of elemental, crucial, primordial, and ultimate questions that we are basically trying to answer. You start by clearing your mind of your habitual answers, so that you don’t prejudice the outcome, and then, using your observational, reflective and intellectual capacities, trying to work out what the answer might be. It’s not easy, but then you are asking the ultimate of the ultimate. If the answers were easy, we would all have discovered them long ago.
And if you do your homework properly and persistently, you will soon realise that none of the answers proposed by any and all of the major religions and philosophies and gurus has any bearing on the subject, because they haven’t bothered to look at the facts. They don’t want to look at them; preferring instead sentimental teachings about love and God and kumbaya.
More on all this, in exhaustive detail (!), still to come.
More on this way of approaching spirituality in ‘Advanced Buddhist Metaphysics: Exercises in Sceptical Spirituality’ from Amazon. (Don’t be intimidated by the title — it’s an easy read for anyone interested.)